Recently, increase in recording density on a magnetic disk serving as a storage medium has been promoted in the technical field of a disk drive apparatus such as a hard disk drive (hereinafter simply called a disk drive). In accordance with the increase in recording density, storage capacity of the disk drive has been also increased and a disk drive of some terabytes (TB) has been developed.
The disk drive is shipped from a factory after its disk is subjected to physical formatting and then subjected to logical formatting and product test during a manufacturing process. The product test includes a step of inspecting a defect of the storage medium (magnetic disk). In this step, a storage medium surface is inspected by an inspection pattern for a surface analysis test (SAT). A defective portion is specified by a physical address of a defective sector. In addition, a logical block address (LBA) is allocated to sectors other than the defective sector, and a logical-physical conversion table for converting the LBA to the physical address is recorded in a system region. In a final step of manufacturing the disk drive, the disk is subjected to the logical formatting, and all zero data is written in a user region as a pattern for formatting.
The above formatting is finished for a short inspection time, for the disk drive of small capacity. In the recently developed disk drive of a large capacity, for example, some terabytes (TB), however, the formatting often takes some tens of hours, which is considered to cause the time required for the manufacturing process to increase. Enhancement of efficiency and simplification in the disk drive manufacturing process are thus required.